Migrating from NewsCatcher

Replace /api/search with /v1/news/everything. Entity filters, sentiment ranges, and IPTC tags map across directly. The changes that need attention are search scope, the article-per-request limit, and two Chinese language codes.

Why teams switch

	NewsCatcher	APITube
Getting a key	Fill in a form, book a demo, talk to sales. No public pricing	Sign up, key in the dashboard, first request in a minute
IPTC tags	v3_nlp_iptc_tags — a paid plan tier	Standard filter on every plan
Articles per request	1,000	250
Sentiment	Title and content	Title, body, and overall, plus per-entity
Query syntax	Boolean, wildcards, NEAR() proximity	Boolean and phrase proximity; no wildcards

The first row is why most people arrive here. NewsCatcher's per-request limit is genuinely higher — that is stated plainly rather than hidden.

Your first request

# NewsCatcher
curl "https://v3-api.newscatcherapi.com/api/search?q=Tesla&lang=en&countries=US&page_size=100&sort_by=date" \
  -H "x-api-token: YOUR_KEY"

# APITube
curl "https://api.apitube.io/v1/news/everything?title=Tesla&language.code=en&source.country.code=us&per_page=100&sort.by=published_at&sort.order=desc" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Parameter mapping

NewsCatcher	APITube	Note
q	title	Headlines only — see below
search_in=title	title	Lossless
lang	language.code	cn and tw both become zh
countries	source.country.code	Either case works
sources	source.domain	Max 3, exact domain
not_sources	ignore.source.domain
theme	category.id	16 themes → IPTC codes
iptc_tags	category.id	Prefix the numeric ID with medtop: — no plan upgrade needed
ORG_entity_name	organization.name
PER_entity_name	person.name
LOC_entity_name	location.name
title_sentiment_min / _max	sentiment.title.score.min / .max	Same −1…1 scale
content_sentiment_min / _max	sentiment.body.score.min / .max
exclude_duplicates	is_duplicate=0
from_ / to_	published_at.start / .end
sort_by=date	sort.by=published_at
page_size	per_page	250 max (10 on Free, 50 on Starter), down from 1,000

The full table of all 57 parameters is in the migration kit.

What does not carry over

Search scope. search_in defaults to title_content. APITube searches headlines. If your query already set search_in: "title", the conversion is lossless.

Wildcards. technolog* has no equivalent, and passing it through returns the entire index with a 200. Expand it by hand into an OR list.

NEAR() proximity. APITube has phrase slop (title="a b"~5) capped at 10 positions inside a headline. NewsCatcher's NEAR() spans 100 words across the whole article.

Clustering. clustering_enabled returns grouped results. APITube puts a story.id on every article but has no clustered response shape.

Chinese. NewsCatcher uses cn and tw; APITube uses zh for both, so the China/Taiwan distinction is lost.

Entity names must match exactly. organization.name=Apple Inc returns 400; Apple works. Check with /v1/suggest/entities?prefix=….

What you gain

IPTC MediaTopics without a plan upgrade, sentiment towards a specific entity (entity.sentiment.score), publisher political bias, readability scoring, geo search by coordinates, and export to eight formats.

Next steps

• newscatcher-apitube-migration-kit — all 57 parameters, the 16-theme IPTC table verified against the live API, a drop-in shim for Node.js and Python, and an AI prompt for bulk conversion
• Parameters reference
• Common migration issues